Try Google Trends, the best tool to find out how often a specific term has been typed in the search engine, and gain competitiveness by improving your SEO strategy.
What is Google Trends ?
Launched in 2006, Google Trends is a free tool that provides data and graphs on the popularity of specific search terms used on both Google and YouTube.
You can use Google Trends to:
- Discover recent trends.
- Identify trending topics or sub-topics around a specific industry or a more general theme.
- Discover trends by geographic area.
Find out how to make the most of Google Trends to help you create content and optimize your organic search rankings.
1. Keyword search
You can perform keyword searches on Google Trends by entering a specific search term on the home page. The default search is based on Google’s most popular keywords at the time of your visit – remember you can also change it to browse search data from YouTube!
Google Trends will then provide you with a graph of the popularity of the requested search term over the past year. You can also change the time interval by widening or shortening the date range.
Reviewing the data for the last two or three years, in relation to that of the past year only, can help you distinguish the real trends and how they are evolving.
For example, the nifty keyword search function allows you to identify keywords with increasing popularity and avoid those with decreasing popularity.
2. Finding related keywords
What makes Google Trends so unique is its ability to recommend related keywords that are currently becoming increasingly popular. This feature is therefore very powerful as it allows you to identify more relevant and accurate keywords based on your main search term.
When you type a search term on the home page, the site will show you a list of keywords that are considered to be closely related to your initial search.
Google Trends shows you these keywords in order of popularity, and even shows you the exact percentage increase in search volume for each of them. Sometimes this percentage will even be replaced by the term “breakout”, indicating that the search volume has increased by more than 5,000% 😱. In our experience, these trends are among the most important as they are not competitive yet – meaning that you can get the first place on Google’s search page before the keyword starts becoming commonly used. This is therefore a real opportunity to improve your ranking. For example, in late 2016, early 2017, we saw a peak in search results for the “black mask” query, those charcoal masks you can apply on your face to cleanse the skin. These were all the rage at some point, and some clever people identified this rising trend and took advantage of it to launch their business, or to monetize their site through affiliation.
The only drawback of building your strategy around trending keywords is that they can sometimes turn out to be only passing fads, and not real medium-term trends.
Unlike permanent content, the content you create around these trending search terms may end up being obsolete.
3. Discovering related topics
In addition to using Google Trends to discover related search terms, you can also use it to discover related topics for future content.
To the left of Related queries, you’ll find another table called Related topics.
Instead of showing you specific search terms, this table gives you an overview of broader topics that people have been searching for.
You will still need to refine specific keywords for each topic you choose to write about – but these recommendations can help you find new ideas and trends for future content.
There are a myriad of ways to use Google Trends to your advantage, both for content marketing and to improve your SEO and gain positions in SERPs.
In an upcoming article, we will describe in a more specific and pragmatic way the techniques for using Google Trends to improve your SEO strategy.